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Availability for July 15


Once again I’m writing this from the road, and will pass on the usual recipes and photographs in the interest of getting this to you sooner. This time, I’m in College Station, Texas, doing some work for my day job. As much as I’d like to farm and manage Athens Locally Grown full time, I do have a regular office job that keeps me pretty busy, and so here I am.

It would have been a good week to stay in Athens, as the annual “Taste Your Place” celebration kicked off yesterday. If you’ve not heard of this two-week festival of Athens’ local food system, that’s ok… it’s only in its third year. Put on by P.L.A.C.E., this series of events packs more into two weeks than pretty much any other festival I’ve seen. There are restaurant testings, films, lectures, book discussions, awards, cooking contests, pot luck meals, and more. It’s really quite a lineup, and I encourage you to attend one or more of the events. You can find out more at their website, and the breadth of what P.L.A.C.E. has been able to put together is a testament to how vibrant and mature our food system has become in a few short years, to the point that Athens Locally Grown is just one small part of a much larger whole.

Today was our July Farmer for a Day event, held at Veribest Farm. Unfortunately my flight left too early for me to attend, and I’d been looking forward to his tour all year. Our next one, scheduled for Saturday August 7th, should be an interesting one too. It’ll be held at Flatwoods Farm in Elberton. The farm is run by a recently retired UGA physics professor and his wife, and is USDA certified organic. They’re still small and in the start=up phase (and so only occasional have offerings through ALG), and should be a great introduction into what it takes to start a small scale USDA certified vegetable farm. There are slots still available for both our August and September Farmer for a Day events, and you can find more details on all of them on the Market page of the website, under the Event Reservations category.

Our “Meet the Grower” table will be manned this week by Daniel Dover of Darby Farms. Daniel hosted our first “Grower for a Day” event of the season. This beautiful article in the Flagpole (and this short YouTube video) came out of that event. He’ll love to talk with you about what he does at his farm and why he’s so passionate about it, so please stop and say hello while you’re waiting for us to fill your order.

Due to some logistical conflicts, both Split Creek Farm and Mac’s Eggs will be going to an every-other-week schedule through the end of August. Several of you noticed they weren’t listed last week, and I apologize for not giving you more notice. If you’re a regular customer of either farm, get two week’s worth now, because they’ll be unavailable again next week.

If you’ve got an old iPhone or iPod touch lying around you don’t need, would you consider donating it to us? With the two iPads we have at the pay table and if each of the six volunteers filling orders had an iPhone or iPod touch, we will save a ream of paper a week. That’s a lot of paper, and it adds up fast. Not only that, but doing everything live on the website has really helped us prevent the errors that we sometimes make filling orders, and at the very least make sure you get a proper refund when we do leave something out. It’s also greatly cut down on the behind-the-scenes work I do keeping all the books in order. It doesn’t matter how old it is. We’ve been given three of them, one of each model Apple of iPhone has made, and all three do exactly what we need. Only three more, and we can go entirely paperless. Thanks!

The Athens Farmers Market is held every Saturday morning at Bishop Park from 8am to noon and every Tuesday evening at Little Kings downtown. It’s a totally separate entity from Athens Locally Grown, but you’ll find many of the same growers at both. And of course, you can learn more about that market on their website.

I forgot about the time zone difference, and just realized it’s going to be midnight there before too much longer, so I’m going to stop right now and just open the market already. Thank you for all of your support of Athens Locally Grown and our member growers. Without your patronage and demand for locally grown and naturally grown foods, the growers wouldn’t be here to meet that demand, and our entire community would be much worse off. Thank you! We’ll see you on Thursday from 4:30 to 8pm at Ben’s Bikes, at the corner of Pope and Broad!